Permanent Gene Damage Done To Your Body With Smoking

50% of all patients who are diagnosed as having lung cancer are former smokers

According to the B.C. Cancer Agency a new study done by them shows that you should never pick up a cigarette at all and that people who quit smoking are still at elevated risk for lung cancer than individuals who never smoked at all. This new study shows that some genes in the human body will suffer from permanent damage from cigarette smoke and the researchers explained that this is why around 50 percent of all patients who are diagnosed as having lung cancer are former smokers and not necessarily current smokers.

The researchers went on to explain that smoking is similar to playing Russian roulette with your health and quite simply that the longer that you continue to smoke to more bullets that are loaded into the gun. The scientists looked at cell samples that they removed from the respiratory tracts of 24 volunteers of whom twelve were former smokers, eight were actual smokers and four of whom had never lit up a cigarette.

They used a new technique called serial analysis of gene expression or SAGE for short which can identify the activity of gene patterns. They saw that at least 600 individual genes were affected by smoking and that while the majority of them returned to normal when smokers quit there were still around 120 of them that did not revert back to their original patterns.

For the purposes of the study a former smoker was someone who had to quit smoking for at least one year but on average the former smokers in this study had quit for eleven years showing that the permanent changes to the gene makeup was likely to be there for the remainder of their lives. However all of the ex smokers had smoked very heavily for at least fifteen years.

This research adds weight to the hypothesis that smoking does permanent harm to your body and that the health risks linked with smoking do not simply disappear overnight when you decide to quit the habit. Be warned that it is dangerous to light that first cigarette because the effects could be with you for the rest of your life.